It was the Master thesis by S. F. Oldenburg. He analyzes two Buddhist texts: ‘Tale on the Golden Age’ – where the life of Buddha was intertwined with legends and sermons, and ‘Garlands of Jataka’ – one of the version of stories about the rebirths of Buddha. For their interpretation the author tried to solve several issues of sources, the place and the time of their origin, the history of the text, and the place of both monuments in the Buddhist canon.
The book can be read as a kind of introduction to the series Bibliotheca Buddhica, a collection of original and translated Buddhist texts, which O. and F. I. Shcherbatsky started to publish in 1897.